Language and Testimony in Classical Indian Philosophy

Speculations about the nature and function of language in India can be
traced to its earliest period. These speculations are multi-faceted in
that one detects many different strands of thought regarding language.
Some of these speculations are about what one may call the principle
of language, but others are about specific languages or specific uses
of these languages. One sees speculations regarding the creation of
language as well as the role of language in the creation of the
universe. Language appears in relation to gods as well as humans, and
occupies the entire width of a spectrum from being a divinity herself
to being a means used by gods to create and control the world, and
ultimately to being a means in the hands of the human beings to
achieve their own religious as well as mundane purposes. Gradually, a
whole range of questions are raised about all these various aspects of
language in the evolving religious and philosophical traditions in
India, traditions which shared some common conceptions, but thrived in
full-blooded disagreements on major issues. Such disagreements relate
to the ontological nature of language, its communicative role, the
nature of meaning, and more specifically the nature of word-meaning
and sentence-meaning. On the other hand, certain manifestations of
language, whether in the form of specific languages like Sanskrit or
particular scriptural texts like the Vedas, became topics of
contestation between various philosophical and religious traditions.
Finally, one must mention the epistemic role and value of language,
its ability or inability to provide veridical knowledge about the
world. In what follows, I intend to provide a brief account of these
diverse developments in ancient, classical and medieval India. (For an
approximate chronology of Indian philosophers, see the
supplement.)

The Vedic scriptural texts (1500–500 bce)
consist of the four ancient collections, i.e.,
the Ṛgveda, the Sāmaveda, the
Yajurveda, and the Atharvaveda. The next layer of
Vedic texts, the Brāhmaṇas, consists of prose
ritual commentaries that offer procedures, justifications, and
explanations. The last two categories of Vedic literature are the
Āraṇyakas, “Forest Texts”, and the
Upaniṣads, “Secret Mystical Doctrines”.

The word saṃskṛta is not known as a label of a
language variety during the Vedic period. The general term used for
language in the Vedic texts is vāk, a word historically
related to “voice”. The Vedic poet-sages perceived
significant differences between their own language and the languages
of the outsiders. Similarly, they perceived important differences
between their own use of language in mundane contexts and the use of
language directed toward Gods. The Gods are generically referred to by
the term deva, and the language of the hymns is said to be
devīvāk, “divine language.”
This language is believed to have been created by the Gods themselves.
The language thus created by the Gods is then spoken by the animate
world in various forms. The divine language in its ultimate form is so
mysterious that three-quarters of it are said to be hidden from the
humans who have access only to a quarter of it. The Vedic poet-sages
say that this divine language enters into their hearts and that they
discover it through mystical introspection. Just as the language used
by the Vedic poet-sages is the divine language, the language used by
the non-Vedic people is said to be un-godly (adevī) or
demonic (asuryā).

In the Vedic literature, one observes the development of mystical and
ritual approaches to language. Language was perceived as an essential
tool for approaching the gods, invoking them, asking their favors, and
thus for the successful completion of a ritual performance. While the
Gods were the powers that finally yielded the wishes of their human
worshipers, one could legitimately look at the resulting reward as
ensuing from the power of the religious language, or the power of the
performing priest. This way, the language came to be looked upon as
having mysterious creative powers, and as a divine power that needed
to be propitiated before it could be successfully used to invoke other
gods. This approach to language ultimately led to deification of
language and the emergence of the Goddess of Speech (vākdevī), and a number of other gods who are called
“Lord of Speech” (brahmaṇaspati,
bṛhaspati, vākpati).

In contrast with the valorous deeds of the divine language, the
language of the non-Vedic people neither yields fruit nor blossom
(Ṛgveda, 10.71.5). “Yielding fruit and
blossom” is a phrase indicative of the creative power of speech
that produces the rewards for the worshiper. From being a created but
divine entity, the speech rises to the heights of being a divinity in
her own right and eventually to becoming the substratum of the
existence of the whole universe. The deification of speech is seen in
hymn 10.125 of the Ṛgveda where the Goddess of Speech
sings her own glory. In this hymn, one no longer hears of the creation
of the speech, but one begins to see the speech as a primordial
divinity that creates and controls other gods, sages, and the human
beings. Here the goddess of speech demands worship in her own right,
before her powers may be used for other purposes. The mystery of
language is comprehensible only to a special class of people, the wise
Brāhmaṇas, while the commoners have access to and
understanding of only a limited portion of this transcendental
phenomenon.

The “Lord of Speech” divinities typically emerge as
creator divinities, e.g., Brahmā,
Bṛhaspati, and Brahmaṇaspati, and the
word brahman which earlier refers, with differing accents, to
the creative incantation and the priest, eventually comes to assume in
the Upaniṣads the meaning of the creative force behind
the entire universe. While the Vedic hymns were looked upon as being
crafted by particular poet-sages in the earlier period, gradually a
rising perception of their mysterious power and their preservation by
the successive generations led to the emergence of a new conception of
the scriptural texts. Already in the late parts of the
Ṛgveda (10.90.9), we hear that the verses
(ṛk), the songs (sāma), and the ritual
formulas (yajus) arose from the primordial sacrifice offered
by the gods. They arose from the sacrificed body of the cosmic person,
the ultimate ground of existence. This tendency of increasingly
looking at the scriptural texts as not being produced by any human
authors takes many forms in subsequent religious and philosophical
materials, finally leading to a wide-spread notion that the Vedas are
not authored by any human beings (apauruṣeya), and are
in fact uncreated and eternal, beyond the cycles of creation and
destruction of the world. In late Vedic texts, we hear the notion that
the real Vedas are infinite (ananta) and that the Vedas known
to human poet-sages are a mere fraction of the real infinite
Vedas.

In the late Vedic traditions of the Brāhmaṇas, we
are told that there is perfection of the ritual form
(rūpasamṛddhi) when a recited incantation echoes
the ritual action that is being performed. This shows a notion that
ideally there should be a match between the contents of a ritual
formula and the ritual action in which it is recited, further
suggesting a notion that language mirrors the external world in some
way. In the Āraṇyakas and
Upaniṣads, language acquires importance in different
ways. The Upaniṣads, emphasizing the painful nature of
cycles of rebirths, point out that the ideal goal should be to put an
end to these cycles of birth and rebirth and to find one’s permanent
identity with the original ground of the universal existence, i.e.,
Brahman. The term brahman, originally referring to
creative ritual chants and the chanters, has now acquired this new
meaning, the ultimate creative force behind the universe. As part of
the meditative practice, one is asked to focus on the sacred syllable
OM, which is the symbolic linguistic representation of Brahman. Here
the language, in the form of OM, becomes an important tool for the
attainment of one’s mystical union with Brahman. The Sanskrit word
akṣara refers to a syllable, but it also means
“indestructible.” Thus, the word akṣara
allowed the meditational use of the holy syllable OM to ultimately
lead to one’s experiential identity with the indestructible reality of
Brahman.

The role of language and scripture in the Upaniṣadic mode of
religious life is complicated. Here, the use of language to invoke the
Vedic gods becomes a lower form of religious practice. Can Brahman be
reached through language? Since Brahman is beyond all
characterizations and all modes of human perception, no linguistic
expression can properly describe it. Hence all linguistic expressions
and all knowledge framed in language are deemed to be inadequate for
the purpose of reaching Brahman. In fact, it is silence that
characterizes Brahman, and not words. Even so, the use of OM-focused
meditation is emphasized, at least in the pre-final stages of
Brahman-realization.

By the time we come to the classical philosophical systems in India,
one more assumption is made by almost all Hindu systems, i.e., that
all the Vedas together form a coherent whole. The human authorship of
the Vedic texts has long been rejected, and they are now perceived
either as being entirely uncreated and eternal or created by God at
the beginning of each cycle of creation. Under the assumption that
they are entirely uncreated, their innate ability to convey truthful
meaning is unhampered by human limitations. Thus if all the Vedic
texts convey truth, there cannot be any internal contradictions. If an
omniscient God, who by his very nature is compassionate and beyond
human limitations, created the Vedas, one reaches the same conclusion,
i.e., there cannot be any internal contradictions. The traditional
interpretation of the Vedas proceeds under these assumptions. If there
are seeming contradictions in Vedic passages, the burden of finding
ways to remove those seeming contradictions is upon the interpreter,
but there can be no admission of internal contradictions in the texts
themselves.

Before the emergence of the formalized philosophical systems or the
darśanas, we see a number of philosophical issues
relating to language implicitly and explicitly brought out by the
early Sanskrit grammarians, namely Pāṇini,
Kātyāyana and Patañjali. Pāṇini (400 bce)
composed his grammar of Sanskrit with a certain
notion of Sanskrit as an atemporal language. For him, there were
regional dialects of Sanskrit, as well as variation of usage in its
scriptural (chandas) and contemporary
(bhāṣā) domains. All these domains are
treated as sub-domains of a unified language, which is not restricted
by any temporality.

Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya refers to the
views of Vyāḍi and Vājapyāyana on the meaning of
words. Vyāḍi argued that words like “cow”
denote individual instances of a certain class, while
Vājapyāyana argued that words like “cow” denote
generic properties or class properties (ākṛti),
such as cowness, that are shared by all members of certain classes.
Patañjali presents a long debate on the extreme positions in
this argument, and finally concludes that both the individual
instances and the class property must be included within the range of
meaning. The only difference between the two positions is about which
aspect, the individual or the class property, is denoted first, and
which is understood subsequently. This early debate indicates
philosophical positions that get expanded and fully argued in the
traditions of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas
and the Mīmāṃsakas.

The early commentators on Pāṇini’s grammar from the late
Mauryan and post-Mauryan periods, Kātyāyana and
Patañjali (200–100 bce), display
a significant reorganization of Brahmanical views in the face of
opposition from Jains and Buddhists. For Kātyāyana and
Patañjali, the Sanskrit language at large is sacred like the
Vedas. The intelligent use of Sanskrit, backed by the explicit
understanding of its grammar, leads to prosperity here and in the next
world, as do the Vedas. Kātyāyana and Patañjali admit
that vernaculars as well as Sanskrit could do the function of
communicating meaning. However, only the usage of Sanskrit produces
religious merit. This is an indirect criticism of the Jains and the
Buddhists, who used vernacular languages for the propagation of their
faiths. The grammarians did not accept the religious value of the
vernaculars. The vernacular languages, along with the incorrect uses
of Sanskrit, are all lumped together by the Sanskrit grammarians under
the derogatory terms apaśabda and
apabhraṃśa, both of which suggest a view that the
vernaculars are degenerate or “fallen” forms of the divine
language, i.e., Sanskrit. Kātyāyana says: “While the
relationship between words and meanings is established on the basis of
the usage of specific words to denote specific meanings in the
community of speakers, the science of grammar only makes a regulation
concerning the religious merit produced by the linguistic usage, as is
commonly done in worldly matters and in Vedic rituals” (first
Vārttika on the
Aṣṭādhyāyī). Kātyāyana
refers to these “degenerate” vernacular usages as being
caused by the inability of the low-class speakers to speak proper
Sanskrit. The grammarians tell the story of demons that used improper
degenerate usages during their ritual and hence were defeated.

The relationship between Sanskrit words and their meanings is said to
be established (siddha) and taken as given by the
grammarians. Patañjali understands this statement of
Kātyāyana to mean that the relationship between Sanskrit
words and their meanings is eternal (nitya), not created
(kārya) by anyone. Since this eternal relationship,
according to these grammarians, exists only for Sanskrit words and
their meanings, one cannot accord the same status to the vernaculars,
which are born of an inability on the part of their speakers to speak
proper Sanskrit.

While Pāṇini uses the term prakṛti to refer
to the derivationally original state of a word or expression before
changes effected by grammatical operations are applied,
Kātyāyana and Patañjali use the term
vikṛta to refer to the derivationally transformed
segment. However, change and identity are not compatible within more
rigid metaphysical frameworks, and this becomes apparent in the
following discussion. In his Vārttikas or comments on
Pāṇini’s grammar, Kātyāyana says that one could
have argued that an item partially transformed does not yet lose its
identity (Vārttika 10 on P. 1.1.56). But such an
acceptance would lead to non-eternality (anityatva) of
language (Vārttika 11,
Mahābhāṣya, I, p. 136), and that is not
acceptable. Patañjali asserts that words in reality are eternal
(nitya), and that means they must be absolutely free from
change or transformation and fixed in their nature. If words are truly
eternal, one cannot then say that a word was transformed and is yet
the same. This points to the emerging ideological shifts in
philosophical traditions, which make their headway into the tradition
of grammar, and finally lead to the development of newer conceptions
within the tradition of grammar and elsewhere.

In trying to figure out how the emerging doctrine of nityatva
(“permanence”, “immutability”) of language
causes problems with the notion of transformation
(vikāra) and how these problems are eventually answered
by developing new concepts, we should note two issues, i.e., temporal
fixity or flexibility of individual sounds, and the compatibility of
the notion of sequence of sounds, or utterance as a process stretched
in time. From within the new paradigm of nityatva or
eternality of sounds, Kātyāyana concludes that the true
sounds (varṇa) are fixed in their nature in spite of
the difference of speed of delivery (Vārttika 5 on P.
1.1.70, Mahābhāṣya, I, p. 181). The speed of
delivery (vṛtti) results from the slow or fast
utterance of a speaker (vacana), though the true sounds are
permanently fixed in their nature. Here, Kātyāyana broaches
a doctrine that is later developed further by Patañjali, and
more fully by Bhartṛhari. It argues for a dual ontology. There
are the fixed true sounds (varṇa), and then there are
the uttered sounds (vacana, “utterance”). It is
Patañjali who uses, for the first time as far as we know, the
term sphoṭa to refer to Kātyāyana’s
“true sounds which are fixed” (avasthitāvarṇāḥ) and the term dhvani
(“uttered sounds”). Patañjali adds an important
comment to Kātyāyana’s discussion. He says that the real
sound (śabda) is thus the sphoṭa
(“the sound as it initially breaks out into the open”),
and the quality [length or speed] of the sound is part of
dhvani (“sound as it continues”)
(Mahābhāṣya, I, p. 181). The term
sphoṭa refers to something like exploding or coming
into being in a bang. Thus it refers to the initial production or
perception of sound. On the other hand, the stretching of that sound
seems to refer to the dimension of continuation. Patañjali
means to say that it is the same sound, but it may remain audible for
different durations.

This raises the next problem that the grammarians must face: can a
word be understood as a sequence or a collection of sounds?
Kātyāyana says that one cannot have a sequence or a
collection of sounds, because the process of speech proceeds
sound-by-sound, and that sounds perish as soon as they are uttered.
Thus, one cannot have two sounds co-existing at a given moment to
relate to each other. Since the sounds perish as soon as they are
uttered, a sound cannot have another co-existent companion
(Vārttikas 9 and 10 on P. 1.4.109). Kātyāyana
points out all these difficulties, but it is Patañjali who
offers a solution to this philosophical dilemma. Patañjali
suggests that one can pull together impressions of all the uttered
sounds and then think of a sequence in this mentally constructed image
of a word (Mahābhaṣya, I, p. 356). Elsewhere,
Patañjali says that a word is perceived through the auditory
organ, discerned through one’s intelligence, and brought into being
through its utterance (Mahābhaṣya, I, p. 18).
While Patañjali’s solution overcomes the transitoriness of the
uttered sounds, and the resulting impossibility of a sequence, there
is no denial of sequentiality or perhaps of an imprint of
sequentiality in the comprehended word, and there is indeed no claim
to its absolutely unitary or partless character. Patañjali
means to provide a solution to the perception of sequentiality through
his ideas of a mental storage of comprehension. But at the same time,
this mental storage and the ability to view this mental image allows
one to overcome the difficulty of non-simultaneity and construct a
word or a linguistic unit as a collection of perceived sounds or
words, as the case may be. Kātyāyana and Patañjali
specifically admit the notion of samudāya
(“collection”) of sounds to represent a word and a
collection of words to represent a phrase or a sentence
(Vārttika 7 on P. 2.2.29). Thus, while the ontology of
physical sounds does not permit their co-existence, their mental
images do allow it, and once they can be perceived as components of a
collection, one also recognizes the imprint of the sequence in which
they were perceived. Neither Kātyāyana nor Patañjali
explicitly claim any higher ontological status to these word-images.
However, the very acceptance of such word-images opens up numerous
explanatory possibilities.

Although Kātyāyana and Patañjali argue that the
notion of change or transformation of parts of words was contradictory
to the doctrine of nityatva (“permanence”) of
language, they were not averse to the notion of substitution. The
notion of substitution was understood as a substitution, not of a part
of a word by another part, but of a whole word by another word, and
this especially as a conceptual rather than an ontological
replacement. Thus, in going from “bhavati” to
“bhavatu”, Pāṇini prescribes the
change of “i” of “ti” to
“u” (cf. P.3.4.86: “eruḥ”). Thus, “i” changes to
“u”, leading to the change of
“ti” to “tu”, and this
consequently leads to the change of “bhavati” to
“bhavatu”. For Kātyāyana and
Patañjali, the above atomistic and transformational
understanding of Pāṇini’s procedure goes contrary to the
doctrine of nityatva (“permanence”) of words.
Therefore, they suggest that it is actually the substitution of the
whole word “bhavati” by another whole word
“bhavatu”, each of these two words being eternal
in its own right. Additionally they assert that this is merely a
notional change and not an ontological change, i.e., a certain item is
found to occur, where one expected something else to occur. There is
no change of an item x into an item y, nor does one
remove the item x and place y in its place
(Vārttikas 12 and 14 on P. 1.1.56). This discussion
seems to imply a sort of unitary character to the words, whether
notional or otherwise, and this eventually leads to a movement toward
a kind of
akhaṇḍa-pada-vāda
(“the doctrine of partless words”) in the
Vākyapadīya of Bhartṛhari. While one must
admit that the seeds for such a conception may be traced in these
discussions in the Mahābhāṣya,
Patañjali is actually not arguing so much against words having
parts, as against the notion of change or transformation
(Mahābhāṣya on P. 1.2.20, I, p. 75).

Kātyāyana and Patañjali clearly view words as
collections of sounds. Besides using the term
“samudāya” for such a collection, they also
use the word “varṇasaṃghāta”
(“collection of sounds”). They argue that words are built
by putting together sounds, and that, while the words are meaningful,
the component sounds are not meaningful in themselves. The notion of a
word as a collection (saṃghāta) applies not only
in the sense that it is a collection of sounds, but also in the sense
that complex formations are collections of smaller morphological
components.

This leads us to consider the philosophical developments in the
thought of Bhartṛhari (400 ce), and
especially his departures from the conceptions seen in
Kātyāyana and Patañjali. Apart from his significant
contribution toward an in depth philosophical understanding of issues
of the structure and function of language, and issues of phonology,
semantics and syntax, Bhartṛhari is well known for his claim
that language constitutes the ultimate principle of reality
(śabdabrahman). Both the signifier words and the
signified entities in the world are perceived to be a transformation
(pariṇāma) of the ultimate unified principle of
language.

For Kātyāyana and Patañjali, the level of
padas (“inflected words”) is the basic level of
language for grammar. These words are freely combined by the users to
form sentences or phrases. The words are not derived by
Kātyāyana and Patañjali by abstracting them from
sentences by using the method of anvaya-vyatireka
(“concurrent occurrence and concurrent absence”)
(Vārttika 9 on P. 1.2.45). On the other hand, they claim
that a grammarian first derives stems and affixes by applying the
procedure of abstraction to words, and then in turn puts these stems
and affixes through the grammatical process of derivation
(saṃskāra) to build the words. Here,
Kātyāyana and Patañjali do make a distinction between
the levels of actual usage (vacana) and technical grammatical
analysis and derivation. While full-fledged words (pada)
occur at the level of usage, their abstracted morphological components
do not occur by themselves at that level. However, they do not seem to
suggest that the stems, roots, and affixes are purely imagined
(kalpita).

Bhartṛhari has substantially moved beyond Kātyāyana
and Patañjali. For him, the linguistically given entity is a
sentence. Everything below the level of sentence is derived through a
method of abstraction referred to by the term
anvaya-vyatireka or apoddhāra.
Additionally, for Bhartṛhari, elements abstracted through this
procedure have no reality of any kind. They are kalpita
(“imagined”) (Vākyapadīya, III, 14,
75–76). Such abstracted items have instructional value for those
who do not yet have any intuitive insight into the true nature of
speech (Vākyapadīya, II. 238). The true speech
unit, the sentence, is an undivided singularity and so is its meaning
which is comprehended in an instantaneous cognitive flash
(pratibhā), rather than through a deliberative and/or
sequential process. Consider the following verse of the
Vākyapadīya (II.10):

Just as stems, affixes etc. are abstracted from a given word, so the
abstraction of words from a sentence is justified.

Here, the clause introduced by “just as” refers to the
older more widely prevalent view seen in the
Mahābhāṣya. With the word “so,”
Bhartṛhari is proposing an analogical extension of the procedure
of abstraction (apoddhāra) to the level of a
sentence.

Without mentioning Patañjali or Kātyāyana by name,
Bhartṛhari seems to critique their view that the meaning of a
sentence, consisting of the interrelations between the meanings of
individual words, is essentially not derived from the constituent
words themselves, but from the whole sentence as a collection of
words. The constituent words convey their meaning first, but their
interrelations are not communicated by the words themselves, but by
the whole sentence as a unit. This view of Kātyāyana and
Patañjali is criticized by Bhartṛhari
(Vākyapadīya II.15–16, 41–42). It is
clear that Bhartṛhari’s ideas do not agree with the views
expressed by Kātyāyana and Patañjali, and that the
views of these two earlier grammarians are much closer, though not
identical, with the views later maintained by the
Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas and Mīmāṃsakas. For
Bhartṛhari, the sentence as a single partless unit conveys its
entire unitary meaning in a flash, and this unitary meaning as well as
the unitary sentence are subsequently analyzed by grammarians into
their assumed or imagined constituents.

Finally, we should note that Bhartṛhari’s views on the unitary
character of a sentence and its meaning were found to be generally
unacceptable by the schools of Mīmāṃsā
and Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, as well as by
the later grammarian-philosophers like
Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa and
Nāgeśabhaṭṭa. Their discussion of the
comprehension of sentence-meaning is not couched in terms of
Bhartṛhari’s instantaneous flash of intuition
(pratibhā), but in terms of the conditions of
ākāṅkṣā (“mutual
expectancy”), yogyatā
(“compatibility)”, and āsatti
(“contiguity of words”). In this sense, the later
grammarian-philosophers are somewhat closer to the spirit of
Kātyāyana and Patañjali.

Early Vedic notions about the authorship of the Vedic hymns are
different from philosophical views. Vedic hymns use words like
kāru (“craftsman”) to describe the poet, and
the act of producing a hymn is described as (Ṛgveda
10.71.2): “Like cleansing barley with a sieve, the wise poets
created the speech with their mind”. The poets of the Vedic
hymns are also called mantrakṛt (“makers of
hymns”). Further, each hymn of the Veda is associated with a
specific poet-priest and often with a family of poet-priests. But,
already in the Ṛgveda, there are signs of the beginning
of an impersonal conception of the origin of the Vedas. For instance,
the famous Puruṣa-hymn of the Ṛgveda
describes the hymns of the Ṛgveda, the formulae of
Yajus and the songs of Sāman as originating from the primordial
sacrifice of the cosmic being (Ṛgveda 10.90.9). This
trend to ascribe impersonal origin to the Vedas gets further
accentuated in the Brāhmaṇas and the
Upaniṣads.

Later Hindu notions about the Vedic scriptures and their authority are
in part reflections of Hindu responses to the criticisms of the Vedas
launched by the Buddhists and the Jains. The early Buddhist critique
of the Vedas targets the authors of the Vedic hymns. Vedic sages like
Vasiṣṭha, Viśvāmitra, and Bhṛgu are
described as the ancient authors of the mantras
(porāṇāmantānaṃkattāro), but they are criticized as being ignorant of
the true path to the union with Brahmā (Tevijjasutta;
Dīghanikāya; Suttapiṭaka). So the
Vedas are depicted as being words of ignorant human beings who do not
even recognize their own ignorance. How can one trust such authors or
their words? The Buddhist and the Jain traditions also rejected the
notion of God, and hence any claim that the Vedas were words of God,
and hence authoritative, was not acceptable to them. On the other
hand, the Jain and the Buddhist traditions claimed that their leading
spiritual teachers like Mahāvīra and Buddha were omniscient
(sarvajña) and were compassionate toward humanity at
large, and hence their words were claimed to be authoritative.

Beginning around 200 bce, Hindu ritualists
(Mīmāṃsakas) and logicians
(Naiyāyikas and Vaiśeṣikas) began to
defend their religious faith in the Vedas and in the Brahmanical
religion with specific arguments. Some of these arguments have
precursors in the discussions of the early Sanskrit grammarians,
Kātyāyana and Patañjali. The
Mīmāṃsakas accepted the arguments of the
Buddhists and the Jains that one need not accept the notion of a
creator-controller God. However, the
Mīmāṃsakas attempted to defend the Vedas
against the criticism that the ancient human sages who authored the
hymns of the Vedas were ignorant, while the figures like the Buddha
and Mahāvīra were omniscient. They contested the notion of
an omniscient person (sarvajña), and argued that no
humans could be omniscient and free from ignorance, passion, and
deceit. Therefore, the Buddha and Mahāvīra could not be free
from these faults either, and hence their words cannot be trusted. On
the other hand, the Vedas were claimed to be eternal and intrinsically
meaningful words, uncreated by any human being
(apauruṣeya). Since they were not created by human
beings, they were free from the limitations and faults of human
beings. Yet the Vedas were meaningful, because the relationship
between words and meanings was claimed to be innate. The Vedas were
ultimately seen as ordaining the performance of sacrifices. The
Mīmāṃsakas developed a theory of
sentence-meaning which claimed that the meaning of a sentence centers
around some specific action denoted by a verb-root and an injunction
expressed by the verbal terminations. Thus, language, especially the
scriptural language, primarily orders us to engage in appropriate
actions.

In this connection, we may note that
Mīmāṃsā and other systems of Hindu
philosophy developed a notion of linguistic expression as one of the
sources of authoritative knowledge
(śabdapramāṇa), when other more basic sources
of knowledge like sense perception (pratyakṣa) and
inference (anumāna) are not available. Particularly, in
connection with religious duty (dharma), and heaven
(svarga) as the promised reward, only the Veda is available
as the source of authoritative knowledge. For
Mīmāṃsā, the Veda as a source of
knowledge is not tainted by negative qualities like ignorance and
malice that could affect a normal human speaker.

To understand the Mīmāṃsā doctrine of
the eternality of the Vedas, we need to note that eternality implies
the absence of both a beginning and an end. In Indian philosophy, two
kinds of persistence are distinguished, namely the ever unchanging
persistence (kūṭastha-nityatā), like
that of a rock, and the continuous and yet incessantly changing
existence of a stream like that of a river
(pravāha-nityatā). The persistence claimed
for the Vedas by the Mīmāṃsakas would appear to be of
the kūṭastha (“unchanging
persistence”) kind, while its continuous study from time
immemorial would be of the pravāha-nitya
(“fluid persistence”) kind. Further, the meanings which
the words signify are natural to the words, not the result of
convention. Mīmāṃsā does not think that
the association of a particular meaning with a word is due to
conventions among people who introduce and give meanings to the words.
Further, words signify only universals. The universals are eternal.
Words do not signify particular entities of any kind which come into
being and disappear, but the corresponding universals which are
eternal and of which the transient individuals are mere instances.
Further, not only are the meanings eternal, the words are also
eternal. All words are eternal. If one utters the word
“chair” ten times, is one uttering the same word ten
times? The Mīmāṃsakas say that, if the word is not the
same, then it cannot have the same meaning. The word and the meaning
both being eternal, the relation between them also is necessarily so.
An important argument with which the eternality of the Vedas is
secured is that of the eternality of the sounds of a language.

The Mīmāṃsā conceives of an unbroken and
beginningless Vedic tradition. No man or God can be considered to be
the very first teacher of the Veda or the first receiver of it,
because the world is beginningless. It is conceivable that, just as at
present, there have always been teachers teaching and students
studying the Veda. For the Mīmāṃsakas, the Vedas are
not words of God. In this view, they seem to accept the Buddhist and
the Jain critique of the notion of God. There is no need to assume
God. Not only is there no need to assume that God was the author of
the Vedas, there is no need to assume a God at all. God is not
required as a Creator, for the universe was never created. Nor is God
required as the Dispenser of Justice, for karman brings its own
fruits. And one does not need God as the author of the Vedas, since
they are eternal and uncreated to begin with. The Ṛṣis,
Vedic sages, did not compose the Vedas. They merely saw them, and,
therefore, the scriptures are free from the taint of mortality
implicit in a human origin. The Mīmāṃsā
notion of the authority of the authorless Veda also depends upon their
epistemic theory, that claims that all received cognitions are
intrinsically valid (svataḥpramāṇa), unless and until they are falsified by
subsequent cognitions of higher order.

The traditions of the Naiyāyikas and the Vaiśeṣikas
strongly disagreed with the views of the Mīmāṃsakas
and they developed their own distinctive conceptions of language,
meaning, and scriptural authority. They agreed with the
Mīmāṃsakas that the Vedas were a source of
authoritative knowledge
(śabda-pramāṇa), and yet they
offered a different set of reasons. According to them, only the words
of a trustworthy speaker (āpta) are a source of
authoritative knowledge. They joined the Mīmāṃsakas in
arguing that no humans, including Buddha and Mahāvīra, are
free from ignorance, passion, etc., and no humans are omniscient, and
therefore the words of no human being could be accepted as infallible.
However, they did not agree with the Mīmāṃsakas in
their rejection of the notion of God. In the metaphysics of the
Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika tradition, the
notion of God plays a central role. In defending the notion of God (as
in the Nyāyakusumāñjali of Udayana), they
claimed that God was the only being in the universe that was
omniscient and free from the faults of ignorance and malice. He was a
compassionate being. Therefore, only the words of God could be
infallible, and therefore be trusted. For the Naiyāyikas and
Vaiśeṣikas, the Vedas were words of God, and not the words
of human sages about God. The human sages only received the words of
God in their meditative trances, but they had no authorship role.

On a different level, this argument came to mean that God only spoke
in Sanskrit, and hence Sanskrit alone was the language of God, and
that it was the best means to approach God. God willfully established
a connection between each Sanskrit word and its meaning, saying
“let this word refer to this thing.” Such a connection was
not established by God for vernacular languages, which were only
fallen forms of Sanskrit, and hence the vernaculars could not become
vehicles for religious and spiritual communication. The
Naiyāyikas argued that vernacular words did not even have
legitimate meanings of their own. They claimed that the vernacular
words reminded the listener of the corresponding Sanskrit words that
communicated the meaning.

The term artha in Sanskrit is used to denote the notion of
meaning. However, the meaning of this term ranges from a real object
in the external world referred to by the word to a mere concept of an
object which may or may not correspond to anything in the external
world. The differences regarding what meaning is are argued out by the
philosophical schools of Nyāya,
Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā,
various schools of Buddhism, Sanskrit grammar, and poetics. Among
these schools, the schools of Nyāya,
Vaiśeṣika, and
Mīmāṃsā have realist ontologies.
Mīmāṃsā focuses mainly on interpreting
the Vedic scriptures. Buddhist thinkers generally pointed to language
as depicting a false picture of reality. Sanskrit grammarians were
more interested in language and communication than in ontology, while
Sanskrit poetics focused on the poetic dimensions of meaning.

The modern distinction of “sense” versus
“reference” is somewhat blurred in the Sanskrit
discussions of the notion of meaning. The question Indian philosophers
seem to raise is “what does a word communicate?” They were
also interested in detecting if there was some sort of sequence in
which different aspects of layers of meaning were communicated.
Generally, the notion of meaning is further stratified into three or
four types. First there is the primary meaning, something that is
directly and immediately communicated by a word. If the primary
meaning is inappropriate in a given context, then one moves to a
secondary meaning, an extension of the primary meaning. Beyond this is
the suggested meaning, which may or may not be the same as the meaning
intended by the speaker.

The various Indian theories of meaning are closely related to the
overall stances taken by the different schools. Among the factors
which influence the notion of meaning are the ontological and
epistemological views of a school, its views regarding the role of God
and scripture, its specific focus on a certain type of discourse, and
its ultimate purpose in theorizing.

In the Western literature on the notion of meaning in the Indian
tradition, various terms such as “sense,”
“reference,” “denotation,”
“connotation,” “designatum,” and
“intension” have been frequently used to render the
Sanskrit term artha. However, these terms carry specific
nuances of their own, and no single term adequately conveys the idea
of artha. Artha basically refers to the object
signified by a word. In numerous contexts, the term stands for an
object in the sense of an element of external reality. For instance,
Patañjali says that when a word is pronounced, an
artha “object” is understood. For example:
“bring in a bull”, “eat yogurt”, etc. It is
the artha that is brought in and it is also the
artha that is eaten.

The schools of Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika
set up an ontology containing substances, qualities, actions,
relations, generic and particular properties, etc. With this realistic
ontology in mind, they argue that if the relation between a word and
its artha (“meaning”) were a natural ontological
relation, there should be real experiences of burning and cutting in
one’s mouth after hearing words like “agni”
(“fire”) and “asi”
(“sword”). Therefore, this relationship must be a
conventional relationship (saṃketa), the convention
being established by God as part of his initial acts of creation. The
relationship between a word and the object it refers to is thought to
be the desire of God that such and such a word should refer to such
and such an object. It is through this established conventional
relationship that a word reminds the listener of its meaning. The
school of Mīmāṃsā represents the
tradition of the exegesis of the Vedic texts. However, in the course
of discussing and perfecting principles of interpretation, this system
developed a full-scale theory of ontology and an important theory of
meaning. For the Mīmāṃsakas, the primary tenet is that
the Vedic scriptural texts are eternal and uncreated, and that they
are meaningful. For this orthodox system, which remarkably defends the
scripture but dispenses with the notion of God, the relationship
between a word and its meaning is an innate eternal relationship. For
both Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas and
Mīmāṃsakas, language refers to external states of the
world and not just to conceptual constructions.

The tradition of grammarians, beginning with Bhartṛhari, seems
to have followed a middle path between the realistic theories of
reference (bāhyārthavāda) developed by
Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and
Mīmāṃsā on the one hand, and the
notional/conceptual meaning (vikalpa) of the Buddhists on the
other. For the grammarians, the meaning of a word is closely related
to the level of understanding. Whether or not things are real, we do
have concepts. These concepts form the content of a person’s
cognitions derived from language. Without necessarily denying or
affirming the external reality of objects in the world, grammarians
claimed that the meaning of a word is only a projection of intellect
(bauddhārtha, buddhipratibhāsa). The
examples offered by Sanskrit grammarians such as
“śaśaśṛṅga”
(“horn of a rabbit”) and
“vandhyāsuta” (“son of a barren
woman”) remain meaningful within this theory. Sanskrit
grammarians are thus not concerned with ontological or truth
functional values of linguistic expressions. For them the truth of an
expression and its meaningfulness are not to be equated.

By the middle of the second millennium of the Christian era, certain
uniformity came about in the technical terminology used by different
schools. The prominent schools in this period are the new school of
Nyāya initiated by Gaṅgeśa, the schools of
Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, and Sanskrit
grammar. While all these schools are engaged in pitched battles
against each other, they seem to accept the terminological lead of the
neo-logicians, the Navya-Naiyāyikas. Following the discussion of
the term artha by the neo-logician
Gadādharabhaṭṭa, we can state the general framework
of a semantic theory. Other schools accept this general terminology,
with some variations.

It may be said that the term artha (“meaning”)
stands for the object or content of a verbal cognition or a cognition
that results from hearing a word
(śābda-bodha-viṣaya). Such
a verbal cognition results from the cognition of a word
(śābda-jñāna) on the basis of
an awareness of the signification function pertaining to that word
(pada-niṣṭha-vṛtti-jñāna).
Depending upon the kind of signification function
(vṛtti) involved in the emergence of the verbal
cognition, the meaning belongs to a distinct type. In general
terms:

When a verbal cognition results from the primary signification
function (śakti / abhidhāvṛtti /
mukhyavṛtti) of a word, the object or content of that
verbal cognition is called primary meaning
(śakyārtha / vācyārtha /
abhidheya).

When a verbal cognition results from the secondary signification
function (lakṣaṇāvṛtti /
guṇavṛtti) of a word, the object or content of
that verbal cognition is called secondary meaning
(lakṣyārtha).

When a verbal cognition results from the suggestive signification
function (vyañjanāvṛtti) of a word, the
object or content of that verbal cognition is called suggested meaning
(vyaṅgyārtha / dhvanitārtha).

When a verbal cognition results from the intentional
signification function (tātparyavṛtti) of a word,
the object or content of that verbal cognition is called intended
meaning (tātparyārtha).

Not all the different schools of Indian philosophy accept all of these
different kinds of signification functions for words, and they hold
substantially different views on the nature of words, meanings, and
the relations between words and meanings. However, the above
terminology holds true, in general, for most of the medieval schools.
Let us note some of the important differences.
Mīmāṃsā claims that the sole primary
meaning of the word “bull” is the generic property or the
class property (jāti) such as bull-ness, while the
individual object which possesses this generic property, i.e., a
particular bull, is only secondarily and subsequently understood from
the word “bull”. The school called
Kevalavyaktivāda argues that a particular individual
bull is the sole primary meaning of the word “bull,” while
the generic property bull-ness is merely a secondary meaning.
Nyāya argues that the primary meaning of a word is an
individual object qualified by a generic property
(jāti-viśiṣṭa-vyakti),
both being perceived simultaneously.

Sanskrit grammarians distinguish between various different kinds of
meanings (artha). The term artha stands for an
external object (vastumātra), as well as for the object
that is intended to be signified by a word (abhidheya). The
latter, i.e., meaning in a linguistic sense, could be meaning in a
technical context (śāstrīya), such as the
meaning of an affix or a stem, or it may be meaning as understood by
people in actual communication (laukika). Then there is a
further difference. Meaning may be something directly intended to be
signified by an expression (abhidheya), or it could be
something which is inevitably signified
(nāntarīyaka) when something else is really the
intended meaning. Everything that is understood from a word on the
basis of some kind of signification function (vṛtti) is
covered by the term artha. Different systems of Indian
philosophy differ from each other on whether a given cognition is
derived from a word on the basis of a signification function
(vṛtti), through inference (anumāna), or
presumption (arthāpatti). If a particular item of
information is deemed to have been derived through inference or
presumption, it is not included in the notion of word-meaning.

The scope of the term artha is actually not limited in
Sanskrit texts to what is usually understood as the domain of
semantics in the western literature. It covers elements such as gender
(liṅga) and number (saṃkhyā). It
also covers the semantic-syntactic roles (kāraka) such
as agent-ness (kartṛtva) and object-ness
(karmatva). Tenses such as the present, past, and future, and
the moods such as the imperative and optative are also traditionally
included in the arthas signified by a verb root, or an affix.
Another aspect of the concept of artha is revealed in the
theory of dyotyārtha (“co-signified”)
meaning. According to this theory, to put it in simple terms,
particles such as ca (“and”) do not have any
lexical or primary meaning. They are said to help other words used in
construction with them to signify some special aspects of their
meaning. For instance, in the phrase “John and Tom”, the
meaning of grouping is said to be not directly signified by the word
“and”. The theory of dyotyārtha argues that
grouping is a specific meaning of the two words “John” and
“Tom”, but that these two words are unable to signify this
meaning if used by themselves. The word “and” used along
with these two words is said to work as a catalyst that enables them
to signify this special meaning. The problem of use and mention of
words is also handled by Sanskrit grammarians by treating the
phonological form of the word itself to be a part of the meaning it
signifies. This is a unique way of handling this problem.

Most schools of Indian philosophy have an atomistic view of meaning
and the meaning-bearing linguistic unit. This means that a sentence is
put together by combining words and words are put together by
combining morphemic elements like stems, roots, and affixes. The same
applies to meaning. The word-meaning may be viewed as a fusion of the
meanings of stems, roots, and affixes, and the meaning of a sentence
may be viewed as a fusion of the meanings of its constituent words.
Beyond this generality, different schools have specific proposals. The
tradition of PrābhākaraMīmāṃsā proposes that the words of a
sentence already convey contextualized inter-connected meanings
(anvitābhidhāna) and that the sentence-meaning is
not different from a simple addition of these inherently
inter-connected word-meanings. On the other hand, the Naiyāyikas
and the Bhāṭṭa Mīmāṃsakas propose
that words of a sentence taken by themselves convey only
uncontextualized unconnected meanings, and that these uncontextualized
word-meanings are subsequently brought into a contextualized
association with each other (abhihitānvaya). Therefore,
the sentence-meaning is different from word-meanings, and is
communicated through the concatenation (saṃsarga) of
words, rather than by the words themselves. This is also the view of
the early grammarians like Kātyāyana and
Patañjali.

For the later grammarian-philosopher Bhartṛhari, however, there
are no divisions in speech acts and in communicated meanings. He says
that only a person ignorant of the real nature of language believes
the divisions of sentences into words, stems, roots, and affixes to be
real. Such divisions are useful fictions and have an explanatory value
in grammatical theory, but have no reality in communication. In
reality, there is no sequence in the cognitions of these different
components. The sentence-meaning becomes an object or content of a
single instance of a flash of cognition (pratibhā).

The terms śakyatāvacchedaka and
pravṛttinimitta signify a property which determines the
inclusion of a particular instance within the class of possible
entities referred to by a word. It is a property whose possession by
an entity is the necessary and sufficient condition for a given word
being used to refer to that entity. Thus, the property of potness may
be viewed as the śakyatāvacchedaka controlling the
use of the word “pot”.

The concept of lakṣaṇā (“secondary
signification function”) is invoked in a situation where the
primary meaning of an utterance does not appear to make sense in view
of the intention behind the utterance, and hence one looks for a
secondary meaning. However, the secondary meaning is always something
that is related to the primary meaning in some way. For example, the
expression gaṅgāyāṃghoṣaḥ literally refers to a cowherd-colony on
the Ganges. Here, it is argued that one obviously cannot have a
cowherd-colony sitting on top of the river Ganges. This would clearly
go against the intention of the speaker. Thus, there is both a
difficulty of justifying the linkage of word-meanings
(anvayānupapatti) and a difficulty of justifying the
literal or primary meaning in relation to the intention of the speaker
(tātparyānupapatti). These interpretive
difficulties nudge one away from the primary meaning of the expression
to a secondary meaning, which is related to that primary meaning.
Thus, we understand the expression as referring to a cowherd-colony
“on the bank of the river Ganges”.

It is the next level of meaning or vyañjanā
(“suggestive signification function”) which is analyzed
and elaborated more specifically by authors like Ānandavardhana
in the tradition of Sanskrit poetics. Consider the following instance
of poetic suggestion. With her husband out on a long travel, a
lovelorn young wife instructs a visiting young man: “My dear
guest, I sleep here and my night-blind mother-in-law sleeps over
there. Please make sure you do not stumble at night.” The
suggested meaning is an invitation to the young man to come and share
her bed. Thus, the poetic language goes well beyond the levels of
lexical and metaphorical meanings, and heightens the aesthetic
pleasure through such suggestions.

The nuances of these different theories are closely related to the
markedly different interests of the schools within which they
developed. Sanskrit poetics was interested in the poetic dimensions of
meaning. Grammarians were interested in language and cognition, but
had little interest in ontological categories per se, except as
conceptual structures revealed by the usage of words. For them words
and meanings had to be explained irrespective of one’s metaphysical
views. Nyāya-Vaiśeṣikas were primarily into
logic, epistemology, and ontology, and argued that a valid sentence
was a true picture of a state of reality. The foremost goal of
Mīmāṃsā was to interpret and defend the
Vedic scriptures. Thus, meaning for
Mīmāṃsā had to be eternal, uncreated,
and unrelated to the intention of a person, because its word par
excellence, the Vedic scripture, was eternal, uncreated, and beyond
the authorship of a divine or human person. The scriptural word was
there to instruct people on how to perform proper ritual and moral
duties, but there was no intention behind it. The Buddhists, on the
other hand, aimed at weaning people away from all attachment to the
world, and hence at showing the emptiness of everything, including
language. They were more interested in demonstrating how language
fails to portray reality, than in explaining how it works. The
theories of meaning were thus a significant part of the total agenda
of each school and need to be understood in their specific
context.

–––, 2000. “Language and thought in the
Sanskrit tradition,” in S. Auroux (ed.), History of the
Language Sciences, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, pp.
146–157.

–––, 2002. “Semantics in the history of
South Asian thought,” in M. Deshpande & P. Hook (eds.),
Indian Linguistic Studies: Festschrift in honor of George
Cardona, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, pp. 202–222.